Just as Glenn Beck provided guidance when the elected GOP leadership was in total disarray, could Rachel Maddow do the same for Democrats & progressives? This closing clip from yesterday's show is powerful evidence that Yes, she can!
It starts off innocently enough, with her trademarked infrastructure geekiness... which she goes on to remind us is a huge part of what America is all about. And always has been:
But it's not even that conservatives are anti-American. It's that movement conservatives are--and they are a very tiny fraction of the American populace. In fact, they're a tiny fraction of American conservatives, as there's almost no difference in the levels of support for spending on basic infrastructure such as highways and bridges, the kind of spending that Maddow focused on:
[Source: General Social Survey 1972-2008]
Americans are, above all, a pragmatic people. A get-things-done people. A people of optimism. A people of hope. A people of progress. We are not quitters!
Versailles has forgotten that. Even a presidential campaign supposedly premised on all of the above forgot it as soon as the polls closed in 2008. But we, the people, have not forgotten that. We have not forgotten who we are. We have not forgotten America.
Out of the rack and ruin of our gangster death,
The rape and rot of graft, and stealth, and lies,
We, the people, must redeem
The land, the mines, the plants, the rivers.
The mountains and the endless plain--
All, all the stretch of these great green states--
And make America again!
-- Langston Hughes
"Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel." - Samuel Johnson, April 7, 1775.
"In Dr. Johnson's famous dictionary patriotism is defined as the last resort of a scoundrel. With all due respect to an enlightened but inferior lexicographer I beg to submit that it is the first." - Ambrose Bierce, 1911
Obama's sudden lunge to the right has many facets to it. For one thing, as Arianna Huffington argued, it was supremely stupid politically, going against everything that had previously distinguished him-which only intensified the question of why he did it. This short diary series is an attempt to answer that question in terms of the larger history of American politics that shaped this political moment-a larger history that has shaped Obama in ways he seems quite ignorant of.
It also draws on concepts of cultural hegemony and culture war as originally conceived by the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, particularly a concept of "culture war" much deeper and more penetrating than is generally connoted by the term.. Although Gramsci was clearly a man of the left, his formulations have been widely embraced. No less a figure on the right than Rush Limbaugh wrote about him in his 1992 book, See, I Told You So. And Limbaugh, unlike Obama, actually understood what the term "culture war" means-it is a struggle for control over the cultural institutions whose influence determines what is taken for granted in talking about political reality.
The rightwing control of talk radio is a perfect example of such control, an example that crucially depended on Reagan's FCC overturning the decades-old "Fairness Doctrine." Using the public airwaves to repeatedly demonize large segments of the American people without opportunity for a reply is the sort of fundamental abuse of the public trust on which conservative power is based. This single example alone should suffice to show that the idea Obama promulgates, that we can simply put the culture wars behind us by an act of political will, is both enormously appealing and utterly deluded.
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